In the HBO drama “The Leftovers,” two percent of the world’s population suddenly disappears. This is cast as a fantastical and mysterious occurrence, setting the stage for a surreal tale of science fiction. You should never underestimate American ingenuity, though. We are on the verge of our own age of mass disappearance. It will be all too real. And it will not be fun.

Trump’s big budget bill passed the Senate yesterday. It will now go back the House, and there is more haggling to be done to appease various factions of the Republican Party, but it is a safe bet that it will pass with its biggest priorities intact. That means that an avalanche of new funding for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and anti-immigration measures is, in fact, coming. This is going to spill well past the bounds of what any sane person would consider to be “immigration enforcement.” It is going to create a lavishly funded, unaccountable, quasi-secret police force that will transform our nation for the worse. Very soon.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the terrifying scale of this new funding. This bill contains enough money to build a new system of immigration detention centers far bigger than the entire federal prison system. The American Immigration Council says that it will be enough to facilitate the “daily detention of at least 116,000 non-citizens.” It will let ICE hire more field agents than the FBI. Its $170 billion in funding for Stephen Miller’s rabid campaign to purge America of brown people is comparable to the total annual funding for the United States Army.

Donald Trump envisions himself as an all-powerful leader whose will is equal to law. He is bent on revenge against his political enemies. He has installed extreme loyalists in the Justice Department, the FBI, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and all other security departments. The courts have declined to meaningfully restrain his abuses of these departments. This budget will give him the final piece of the puzzle that he needs to achieve his fever dream: a nationwide army of masked, unaccountable armed agents empowered to snatch anyone they like off the streets, and the physical infrastructure to imprison or deport those people at will. Thousands of men with guns, unrestrained by judges or local police, who do not answer to Congress, who point guns at the press, who arrest whoever they want, for reasons they do not share, and do whatever they wish with those people. The implications of this are going to make America a much darker place.

One year ago, if a Congressman on the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party had called for the forcible deportation of the man who just won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, it could have been dismissed as posturing and delusion. Today, after what has happened over the past six months, you would be delusional not to consider this a serious threat. ICE has already arrested a number of Democratic elected officials, including mayors and members of Congress and a judge. In this environment, it is a trivial matter for Trump and his loyalists to concoct reasons to arrest almost anyone. People can be arrested if they are immigrants, if they look like they might be immigrants, if they illegally harbored or assisted immigrants, or if they somehow impeded ICE’s quest to arrest immigrants. The mission can and will be scaled up from “deport immigrants” to “punish those who want to stand in the way of our mission.” This is already happening, and soon will happen much more, in more places, to a greater degree. We must recognize that we are dealing with people for whom the intellectual justifications are unimportant secondary concerns, made up hastily to pave the way for them to do what they want to do.

This week, the White House told the Justice Department to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by evidence.” Thus we will begin to see some of the 25 million naturalized US citizens who the White House considers to be its enemies have their citizenship revoked. They will be exiled. What sort of criteria might be used to choose these targets? According to the memo, among those prioritized for denaturalization will be “Cases against individuals who pose a potential danger to national security, including those with a nexus to terrorism.” Because “national security” and “terrorism” both mean nothing and everything, this category alone is large enough to cover just about anyone that the administration wants to get rid of. Been to a protest? Written a left-wing op-ed? Shared a meme of JD Vance? You can and will be ejected from America.

Yesterday, JD Vance wrote that everything in Trump’s budget bill “is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.” This statement is false, particularly for the millions of people who will soon be losing their health insurance, but it does illustrate the extent to which Republicans are willing to whip up hatred of immigrants and use it as a smokescreen for their grand class war. It also reminds me that it is impossible for me to put into words my contempt for JD Vance. Men like Stephen Miller are, at least, genuine Nazis to the core, driven by a deep reservoir of hate. Vance, on the other hand, is a lotion-drenched, amoral careerist, a professional ass kisser of monsters, sitting in air conditioned rooms with his fellow Yale graduates dreaming up justifications for racist policies as a way to amuse himself, as a beloved PTA mom who has spent 47 years in America is snatched out of her Louisiana home and separated from her family. If Trump and Miller are the arsonists of American democracy, Vance is the accomplice pointing the firefighters in the wrong direction, to ensure that things burn as completely as his boss wishes.

Yesterday, Trump proudly attended the opening of a concentration camp. There will be many more to come.

Share

It is astonishing how many times we are forced to relearn the Martin Niemoller poem. But here we are! Every few generations, those who lived through the last round of this stuff die off, and a new generation must repeat the same atrocities, and suffer the same indignities, before at least redrawing the same conclusions. America is about to fund and build a huge secret police force that will, I promise you, be used to attack and imprison and exile the president’s enemies, of all sorts. Better to look this fact square in the face than to continue to kid ourselves as long as possible as we march down the road to the gulags.

This state of affairs is the fault of those who are now carrying it out—the White House, the Trump loyalists, the Republican cowards in Congress, the political supporters of fascism. But, if we want to be completely honest, there is a certain level of responsibility that a much broader slice of America must bear. The things that most Americans long countenanced for others are now being turned on us. The surveillance systems, the heavily armed police, the “anti-terrorism” measures, the vast intelligence apparatus—all these things, we imagined, would be used only for “criminals” of the sort that were not us. Now we are surprised to find that we have been defined as the criminals. Turns out we should not have built the systems of injustice in the first place. This is one of morality’s oldest lessons. We relearn, and relearn, and relearn, the hard way.

Getting through the period of American history that is now descending upon us will require all of us to practice radical empathy. A strange quality of even the worst totalitarian fascist states is that very bad things might happen to the person next to you, and your life can still continue as normal. More and more Americans are going to find that their neighbor or their friend or their employee or their colleague was just snatched up by armed men and taken somewhere. And meanwhile, all of us who were not snatched up can still go to McDonald’s and go to the beach and watch TV. The urge to retreat into the comforting security of the idea “it’s not me” will be strong. Yet navigating our way out of this means having a collective heart. You do not know whether they will come for you, or your neighbor, or your friend, or your colleague, and if they come for any one of us, they come for all of us. We must nurture the outrage that fuels the resistance to what is going to happen. We must hit the streets for our neighbors in the same way that our neighbors would hit the streets for us. It is an illusion to think that you are exempt from the gaze of the secret police. That’s not how it works. Believe that they can come for any one of us, and it will give you the conviction that this cannot be allowed to persist. Some bad things are coming. Luckily, we have something that Trump and Vance and Miller and all of the ICE agents never will. All the money and guns and masks and prisons in the world can’t make up for a coward’s weak heart.

Leave a comment

More

• Related reading: Retire the Word “Terrorism”; Anti-Immigration Democrats Fuck Off; Building the American Brownshirts; You’re a Bunch of Cowards!

• Two good causes for you to support today. First, in Philadelphia, more than 9,000 unionized municipal workers are now on strike. If you’d like to assist them either in person, virtually, or financially, sign up at this link. Second, the activists who were arrested and hit with insane charges for protesting Cop City in Atlanta are still suffering as their cases drag on. To help an activist and single mother with housing costs, follow this link. We all take care of one another.

• Thank you for reading How Things Work. This site is pure, uncut Independent media, at a time when independent media is (I’m biased, but) more important than ever. How is it that I am able to do this work? It is only possible because of support from readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers because they want to help this site to continue to exist. That’s it! No corporate sponsors! Only you. (You can buy a How Things Work t-shirt, also). If you enjoy reading How Things Work, you can click the “Subscribe” button below and support us for just six bucks a month or sixty dollars for the full year. I believe this funding model—with no paywall—can work. And so far it has, with your help. I appreciate you all.

Subscribe now

“Mr. President, is there an expected time frame that detainees will spend here — days, weeks, months? And does that have anything to do with the immigration judges you just spoke about being trained and staffed here?”

“When you say, eh, what was the first part of your question?”

“Is there a specific time frame you expect the detainees to spend here — days, weeks, months?”

“In Florida?”

“Yes, here in Alligator Alcatraz.”

“I’m going to spend a lot — look, this is my home state. I love it, I love your government, I love all the people around. These are all friends of mine, they know ’em very well. I mean, I’m not surprised that they do so well. They’re great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in the state. I’ll spend a lot of time here. Eh, I want, eh, you know, for four years, I’ve got to be in Washington and I’m okay with it because I love the White House. I even fixed up the little Oval Office. I make it, it’s like a diamond, it’s beautiful, it’s so beautiful. It wasn’t maintained properly, I will tell you that, but even when it wasn’t, it was still the Oval Office, so it meant a lot. But I’ll spend as much time as I can here. You know, my vacation is generally here ’cause it’s convenient, I live in Palm Beach, it’s my home. And I have a very nice little place, nice little cottage to stay at, right? But we have a lot of fun, and I’m a big contributor to Florida, you know, pay a lot of tax, and a lot of people move from New York, and I don’t know what New York is going to do. A lot of people moved to Florida from New York, and it was for a lot of reasons, but one of them was taxes. The taxes are so high in New York, they’re leaving. I don’t know what New York is gonna to do about that because some of the biggest, wealthiest people and some of the people that pay the most taxes of any people anywhere in the world for that matter, they’re moving to Florida, and other places. So we’re going to have to help some of these states out, I think. But thank you very much. I’ll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.”

Enjoying the newsletter? Gimme $2 for sea-monkeys.

This week’s question comes to us from Dana Chisnell:

How do I get through a day without hearing or seeing anything about AI?

Let’s talk about basketball. My very favorite day of the year is the Saturday the NBA Playoffs kick off, which this year fell on April 19th. (Holy shit, the playoffs last forever.) On Playoff Saturday I get to watch four back-to-back-to-back-to-back basketball games starting at 10am. Same thing on Sunday. Then they start scattering them throughout the week. But that first weekend is pure joy and chaos. You’ve got teams pacing themselves because they believe they’re making a deep run, you’ve got teams that know their only chance to make it to the next round is to do very weird things that the other team isn’t expecting, and you’ve got guys on those latter teams playing for new contracts so they’re doing even weirder things to get noticed. All of this makes for very entertaining basketball. Which is not what you asked me about. We’re getting there.

This also means that for the last two months I’ve been watching a lot of TV ads. I am now an expert on three things: online gambling, GLP-1 drugs, and AI.

Here’s the thing about AI ads: they’re amazing. According to some of the ads I’ve seen, AI will help you write a paper, grade your students’ papers, sheetrock your wall, raise your children, send out invoices, design your website, write your résumé, schedule your aunt’s funeral, give you a good recipe for chicken wings, help you put together an outfit that slays, help you build a LEGO, write a sales report, summarize a sales report, tell you what kind of music you like, put together a good dating profile, teach you how to fire a gun, tell you who to vote for, and recite interesting facts about Hitler.

Here’s the thing about actual AI: aside from the Hitler part, it does precious fucking little of that. But it demos really really well. It’s really easy to make a good AI ad. You come up with a thing that a lot of people hate doing, you decide that AI can do that thing, then you shoot the ad that backs it up. You show it 17 times during Game 6 of the Knicks/Pacers series and 8 million people see it. Subtract a percentage of people who naturally distrust whatever is being advertised on TV and even if that number is 50%, you’ve still convinced 4 million people that Google AI can tell you how to repair a giant hole in your living room wall, which it cannot.

When I was a kid I was mesmerized by the comic book ads for Sea-Monkeys. “Enter the wonderful world of amazing live Sea-Monkeys! Own a bowlful of happiness! Instant pets!” This was the headline next to an amazing illustration of a family of Sea Monkeys posing in front of their Sea Monkey castle. With their big smiles, three-antennae heads, Sea-Monkey dad’s tail strategically covering his Sea-Monkey dick, and Sea-Monkey mom looking like she could get it, with her little Mary Tyler Moore flip-do. There was another illustration of a human family, straight out of the John Birch society playbook overseeing their Sea-Monkeys living in a fishbowl. Reader, I wanted these Sea-Monkeys. They were going to be my new family. So I waited for my Dad to be in a good mood (about to leave for the evening) and I asked him for a dollar. “Only $1.00!” just like the ad told me to say. I filled out the coupon in the ad very very carefully, cut it out very carefully with my mom’s good scissors, put it in an envelope, which I also addressed very carefully, asked my mom for a stamp, and the next day I deposited the envelope in a mailbox on my way to school. Then I waited. And waited. And waited some more.

About 6–8 weeks later I received an envelope back. I ran to my room, where I had a goldfish bowl ready and waiting, opened the envelope, which contained a second smaller envelope, and dumped the contents of that envelope into the fishbowl. I watched as maybe three tiny-as-fuck brine shrimp made their way slowly through the water in the fishbowl, and landed on the bottom with the sound of a deflating dream. From the future, I saw Nelson Muntz point at me and say “ha ha!” And still, I checked that fishbowl on the hour for days. Maybe it just took a little time for my Sea-Monkey family to wake up. It never happened.

AI is Sea-Monkeys.

The promise is there and it’s exciting. The hope of new friends that will live, laugh, love in a little fishbowl next to my bed. Keeping me company. Laughing at my jokes. Saying things like “We wish you could come down here and play with us in our super cool Sea-Monkey castle.” The reality is three dead brine shrimp at the bottom of a fishbowl that your mother eventually flushes down the toilet after calling you an idiot. At least dead brine shrimp don’t tell you that Hitler had some good ideas, actually.

Can AI be useful in certain circumstances? Sure. So are brine shrimp. (They’ve been to space!) Is it all that? It’s not. AI is a Sea-Monkey ad being peddled as a promise of something that it is not.

Sea-Monkeys were my first experience with hype cycles. In retrospect, $1 was a good price for that lesson.

But again, this was not your question. And you already know that, which is why you’re asking the question. Still, it’s worth exploring why we’re seeing and hearing so much about AI right now. Ironically, this will add one more essay to the amount of essays that you’re wishing you could get away from. But having asked the question, you kind of did that to yourself.

Why are we seeing 17 AI ads during a Knicks/Pacers game? One answer is that the tech companies running the ads can afford it. (Ads run around $300k during the later rounds. That number may be wrong, it came from a Google AI summary.) But that speaks more to the how than the why. The why is simple, though. These companies need a hit, and they need a hit bad. Silicon Valley is in a slump. After striking out with blockchain, crypto, NFTs, web3, the metaverse, stupid shit you wear on your face (or more honestly, don’t wear on your face), and pretending (but not really able to actually fool anyone) that they gave a shit about minorities for a brief moment in 2020, the tech industry was losing the room. Mind you, they were still making money hand over fist, but the bloom was coming off the rose. They were coming off an insane couple of decades of innovating at a furious pace, being seen as gods, being invited to all the good parties, and settling into a mature age of “running things while making incremental improvements, with the occasional breakthrough” which, frankly, doesn’t make the cocaine flow. At the same time they were being asked hard questions about weird little things like “was your platform instrumental in a genocide in Myanmar” and “what’s with all the Nazis?” Which, to be fair, are bummer questions. Especially when you’re trying to enjoy cocaine.

So when AI got to the point of almost-kinda-sorta-semi maturity (but not really) they ran with it. Then they tossed in anything else that kinda-sorta felt like AI and tossed that onto the pile as well. Suddenly everything is AI and AI is in everything. Stuff that’s been around forever, like auto-complete and speech-to-text, is now “AI.” It’s not. Suddenly, Google Drive is asking me if it wants me to let AI write these newsletters. I don’t. Suddenly, Google search—the backbone of the internet—is a piece of shit. (OMG, were those em dashes?! Is this AI. Butterfly meme!) Suddenly, students and professors are arguing about who’s writing and grading papers. Suddenly, we’re firing up Three Mile Island so incels can generate six-fingered girlfriends that don’t give them shit for being useless. Suddenly, designers who were previously tasked with making things “user-centered” (This was never a thing, by the way, but that’s beyond the purview of today’s newsletter.) are being tasked with creating good prompts, and then staying up all night manually fixing the slop that was generated while also fearing for their livelihood because… suddenly everyone is unemployed. (Oh, did you think Silicon Valley was trying to artificially extend the bubble for your benefit? My sweet summer child.)

And the Nazi problem was solved by just becoming Nazis themselves. (What if the bug was the feature? S-M-R-T!)

I have yet to answer your question. Which is how you avoid all this shit. Well, it’s hard. Seeing that I can’t even watch a basketball game without being inundated with it. The honest answer is that you’re not going to be able to completely. At least for a little while. The enshittification of everything that previously worked just fine is still speedrunning to the lower circles of hell where venture capitalists count their money. I’m currently hanging on to an old laptop, which mostly works just fine because I know that a new one will be swarming with AI crap. I’m currently hanging on to an old phone for the same reason. Oddly, the shit they thought would re-energize our interest in these things back to a time when people would line up for the latest model of both, has seemingly had the opposite effect. And the folks getting suckered in because the ads are amazing, and because AI demos very well, will eventually realize that what they were sold, and what arrived at the door are two very different things.

But you don’t need to believe me when you can believe Roxanne Gay:

It is a tool designed to render the populace helpless, to make people doubt their innate intelligence, and to foster overreliance on technology.

AI is Sea-Monkeys. AI is hope in exchange for something that’s dead.

Fun fact I just discovered! The company that sells Sea-Monkeys still exists! They just celebrated their 65th anniversary. Good for them. They’ve rebranded to some vague environmental toy you’d find at an aquarium gift shop. But now you get the whole thing at once. No more advertising in comics. No more sending in an envelope with a dollar bill and waiting. Some things never change though. From their FAQ: I HAD A BUNCH OF SEA-MONKEYS BUT THEN THE NUMBER DWINDLED. WHY? Sadly, that’s common in nature. Many babies will hatch knowing that only the strongest will make it to adulthood.

Nature is fucking brutal.

Will AI still be with us in 65 years? Well, as much as I’m confident that anything might still be here in 65 years, sure. The hype cycle will eventually crash, and the parts of AI that actually make people’s lives easier will possibly live on, having safely extracted itself from the hype cycle. And before you write your “well, actually” response… you can’t get mad at people for conflating all the different types of AI, when you purposely threw them all together to build your hype cycle. You did this to yourselves.

I don’t know which parts of AI will survive, but they’re mostly likely not in generative AI. Turns out people like making things.

Silicon Valley’s era of innovation is over. This is their villain era. The era of the con. Having bled themselves dry of ideas, and all sense of moral decency, they’re now attempting to bleed us dry of our own humanity. And lest you think I’m being cynical, my cynicism towards technology comes from a belief in people. I believe that people are capable of good things. I believe people are even capable of great things. I believe that people make great art. I believe that people enjoy making all types of art. I believe that people write amazing things. (People don’t save each other’s love letters because they’re great literature.) I believe that people, at their best, want to communicate, not just with each other in the here and now, but also with those that will hopefully come after us. We want our descendents to know we were here, we want them to know we made things, we want them to know that we talked funny (our descendents will think we talked funny.)

I know this because I’ve seen us do this. I’ve seen us examine the past. I’ve seen us look for evidence of our ancestors. (I’ve also seen us hide evidence of our ancestors.) I’ve seen us gather in museums to see the art our ancestors made. I’ve seen us gather in movie houses to see the movies our ancestors made. Every Nina Simone song. Every Velvet Underground album. Every Ibsen play. Every Cindy Sherman photo. Every Greek myth. Every letter written from a Birmingham jail cell. Every note from Coltrane’s saxophone. It’s the indestructible beat of humankind. Calling from the past to let us know that we love to make ourselves heard, seen, felt and touched.

It’s what we do.

🙋 Got a question? Ask it! I might answer it. Or more likely, pretend to answer it while writing about what’s already swimming in my head.

📣 There’s a few slots left in next week’s Presenting w/Confidence workshop. You should sign up.

🤖 Speaking of AI, here’s an excellent article about why all the tech leaders decided to be nazis.

💸 If you’re enjoying the newsletter and can spare $2/month, I will take it!

🧺 Here’s a very stupid and sexy enamel pin you can buy.

🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

🏳️‍⚧️ …and to Trans Lifeline.

🚰 Say hello. I love hearing from you.

As part of Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill," the House voted to end a retirement supplement aimed at helping federal employees who retire before they're 62.

(Image credit: Ariana Drehsler for NPR)

Here’s a story in two parts, both of which will be crushingly familiar to you. The main character of our tale is Iowa (uh oh) Senator Joni Ernst, who held a town hall in her home state this past Friday. Ernst’s constituents at that town hall were vocally angry about President Trump’s massive tax bill, which passed in the House a month ago and threatens to cut half a trillion dollars in funding to Medicaid. People will die if this bill passes in Ernst’s chamber. When one audience member informed the Senator of this fact, she responded, with supreme Midwestern condescension, “Well, we’re all going to die.”

That’s the first part of our story. The second part is Ernst’s formal response to the heckling, which she recorded on her phone while walking around a graveyard. Take it away, womanboss.